Who doesn’t like streaming music while driving? Unfortunately, new research suggests that when major albums drop and streaming spikes, traffic fatalities rise too.
A group of researchers affiliated with Harvard Medical School recently issued a working paper reporting an association between the release days of the most-streamed albums and an increase in US traffic fatalities. The authors say the pattern is consistent with smartphone-enabled driver distraction, including the use of in-vehicle phone-mirroring platforms.
“Modern smartphones present new threats to road safety beyond talking and texting, but the real-world effects are difficult to study,” the researchers said in their explanation for performing the study. Fatal traffic accidents and release days for popular streaming albums, the team said, were chosen as an “exogenous event” that “may offer an opportunity to quasi-experimentally study the impact of distraction using observational data.”
The results were, if not surprising, then at least statistically significant.
The team used data from the US Fatality Analysis Reporting System, which catalogs all fatal crashes on public US roadways, and compared that to data from Spotify charts, looking specifically at the top 10 albums with the most first-day streams between 2017 and 2022 (Taylor Swift and Drake each appear three times in the top 10, for those curious).
According to their analysis of the data, the total number of streams on the release date for major albums increases by nearly 40 percent. Traffic fatalities on those same days also increased, though by a more modest 15 percent.
That’s a lot of added death on American roadways by drivers distracted by the latest Tay-Tay and Drizzy jams.
Of course, there are plenty of other factors that could help explain such a correlation – major albums are typically released on Fridays, for instance, and weekends may carry different driving patterns, while in-vehicle phone-mirroring systems could theoretically make some interactions less risky. Untangling all of that is tricky in an observational study. The researchers acknowledge those limitations and attempt to address them with extensive controls and multiple robustness checks.
They adjusted for fixed effects like holidays, the day of the week and week of the year, repeated the analyses to select for infotainment systems and other automobile information, and accounted for driver characteristics including age, the number of people in the car, and involvement of alcohol. The team even conducted multiple “placebo album” falsification tests, running experiments on randomly-selected dates, to be sure they weren’t overlooking something else unknown.
Sure, the team admits that its study, as a working paper that has yet to be peer-reviewed, still could be wrong, but so far the data doesn’t suggest that.
“We observed an increase in fatal car crashes in the U.S. on days that major music albums were released and when streaming volumes surged on a large music streaming platform,” the team said. “Multiple additional analyses suggested these findings were not explained by releases occurring on certain days of the week or on holiday weekends.”
As for who is most likely to be caught up in an album drop-date traffic fatality, the data gets incredibly specific and all of it seems to support distracted driving linked to tech usage as the culprit.
Younger drivers were more likely to be part of this statistical pattern, as were those driving alone. The increase was more pronounced in crashes involving sober drivers and was not meaningfully different between daytime and nighttime hours, which the authors say argues against an alcohol-driven explanation. In a subset analysis of newer vehicles, the rise in fatalities was larger among cars identified as Apple CarPlay–capable – a finding the researchers suggest may reflect how phone-mirroring platforms lower the barrier to interacting with streaming apps, though they stop short of identifying a specific causal mechanism.
The team said they hope their research will push lawmakers, smartphone manufacturers, and car companies to “improve driver safety surrounding streaming media,” but didn’t make any particular suggestions as to how.
We reached out to the team to learn more, and while we didn’t get a response, here’s one piece of advice that seems glaringly obvious: Cue up that playlist before you put the car in drive. ®
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.theregister.com ’
